hartford

Hartford and our local anti-ICE ordinance

/ paladin1787 / Leave a comment

The situation I learned about today (Monday) appears, at best, an egregious violation of voter sovereignty. At worst, we in Hartford government are not following rule #1 of the advice in the pamphlet “On Tyranny”:

1. Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

Below is a post I made to the local list-serv. It’s date-stamped with references to an upcoming board meeting, but that’s what web-logs are, right? A moment in time? The content will remain important regardless when you read it. Onward:

If you care about how federal immigration law is being enforced in Hartford against our neighbors, you would do well to attend Tuesday’s Selectboard meeting, from 6pm to roughly 9 at Town Hall. It’s promising to be a spicy one, as the board will likely find some time to discuss the Welcoming Hartford Ordinance and how it is being enforced here. Or not enforced, as the case may be.

Wait, you thought we had already secured a Welcoming Hartford? Well, so did I! Ever since I joined the elected board—for whom I am not speaking, by the way—I’ve been regaled with this ordinance as part of why “we’re among the most progressive communities in the country,” especially including policing. However, on Monday, I and the rest of the Selectboard learned that Hartford PD has so far refused to alter a state-standard boilerplate policing policy to allow for the Welcoming Hartford Ordinance (WHO) to fully take effect. How long has this been the case? I’m not sure! Perhaps since it passed four years ago!

For background: the WHO basically describes that local police are prohibited from working with ICE and other federal agents to target, for civil immigration cases, any undocumented neighbors we may have in Hartford. Voters approved the ordinance in 2020 in a wide-margin vote, 1842 to 1177 votes.
Monday, I heard about ICE agents asking for identification at our Greyhound bus stop in White River Junction. Your neighbors may not be protected like you thought they would be with the WHO.

It would appear, according to a September memo from the police chief that the Selectboard was forwarded today, that Hartford police policy still leaves open the door to collaborating with ICE. This is despite legal analysis from ACLU and others that appears to show a department would be fully lawful in following the ordinance, at both the state and federal levels. ACLU-VT seems to have found that the state specifically provided for towns, if they so choose, to enact laws like this. While I’m not an attorney myself, if this is true then any retaliation from the state law enforcement body (such as refusing to train our officers, a specter someone raised today) could be challenged on this basis.

I, for one, believe that not following the wishes of voters—and worse, not informing them of that decision—disqualifies Hartford PD from being described with the term “progressive.” In our search for the next Chief (the outgoing one is departing soon), we should ensure all candidates for the role will revise this state boilerplate to comport with the ordinance our voters fought for.

I’m also curious who else in town government knew about this internal decision, since the board only learned of it Monday. Did officers joke among themselves that “the WHO isn’t actually enforceable anyway,” and laugh all the way to the bank? For what it’s worth, I think it’s more accurate to say that police are defunding *us* than to say the converse. When the board was attempting to make ends meet in the budgeting process this winter, I said I wouldn’t vote for a budget that cuts $300,000 from what the roads department wanted while not cutting anything from what the PD wanted. I proposed that, if we have to cut that much from roads, then we should also cut $100,000 from PD: a sum described to me earlier that evening as being for an as-yet-unhired position this year. (That’s right—an expansion.) With our current board, I didn’t get a “second” for this proposal; no one else would call for a vote. Perhaps that’s because of the idea of a “progressive police department.” Perhaps it’s time to lay that fallacy to rest and to make the department into something the majority of us can stand behind. Starting with the WHO.

If you wish to voice that you don’t appreciate your vote being thwarted by a non-attorney staffer’s legal analysis, which itself is contested by the analysis of attorneys who serve as directors of state-wide legal organizations, then I wholeheartedly encourage you to attend Tuesday’s meeting and say something.

Last but not least: for anyone still wondering why it’s important to work to defend our neighbors in this way: the current U.S. president is apparently giving ICE the latitude to “deport” Native Americans who don’t speak English well. (Think about that for a minute, and how clearly it reveals ICE as a race-based endeavor.)

To Ms. Abetti, the following article shows that last year, 72% of ICE arrests were of someone with a criminal record. This year, only 52% are. So Trump’s ICE is being measurably less choosing of whose lives they upend.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/ice-trump-deportations-numbers-rcna188937

And: standing up against shenanigans like these hardly means “a country without borders.” If you’d like to discuss ICE and the most moral response to it, we should probably do so without the presence of “straw men” arguments.

Inflation and town taxes

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I’ve been seeing some healthy discussion about town taxes on the listserv. So I’m sharing a few thoughts of my own. This is the whole post, without the daily-repeated disclaimers: “I’m a town board member, but cannot (& don’t here) claim to speak for Town Hall.” I very much appreciate hearing your perspectives on it, so feel free to write me.

First, some background. Just prior to the recent meeting where the board approved a tax increase, relevant town staff had gotten together—an annual practice—and come up with how much we would need to increase the tax rate to fund the town budget that was approved by voters this spring. That’s Hartford’s process.

Property taxes apparently needed to go up 7.53% to meet this budget. I joined the board too late to help craft it, but as I understand, services weren’t really expanded; just kind of held where they were. And yet, 7% is a big deal. My rent will likely be going up; a lot of folks have it a lot harder.

Inflation is the outsized culprit. An aside: a peer-reviewed study found that 50% of covid-era inflation was due to corporate price-gouging. Big companies using the fact that folks are discussing inflation as “cover” to pad profits more than their costs are rising. Historically, this study claims, only about 10% of inflation is from obvious price-gouging. So we saw a five-fold increase in big business ripping people off during this vulnerable time. Yet another reason to buy locally-produced goods if possible. But I digress.

I brought up inflation during the board meeting that featured tax rates. I had done some “napkin math”; I’ll share it here too. The treasurer had provided us town tax rates for the last six years. I compared these to inflation in the years that informed them. As you’ll see, inflation—increases in cost of goods/services—and increases in rate of tax match up pretty well until the Covid price-gouging era. Starting at that point, it seems like the town tries to absorb the inflationary blows for its residents by keeping tax increases lower than inflation. So judging by “real dollars” AKA purchasing power, the town *lowered* the rax rate in those years. Check it out:

FY 2020 tax increase: 1.93%, set in June 2019 based on the budget made in fall 2018. Rate of overall U.S. inflation in 2018 was 1.9%.

2019 inflation: 2.3%.  FY 2021 tax increase: 2.25%

2020 inflation: 1.4%.  FY 2022 tax increase: 1.44%

2021 inflation: 7.0%.  FY 2023 tax increase: 1.82%

2022 inflation: 6.5%.  FY 2024 tax increase: 3.35%

2023 inflation: 3.4%.  FY 2025 tax increase: 7.53%

You can form your own conclusions. But it seems to me like the town held off increasing its budget (and thus taxes), even in the face of huge inflation, for as long as it could. The biggest problem with inflation, though, is that it compounds. (You’ve seen the magic of compounding interest with investments; this is its evil twin.) Compound inflation since Covid struck has totaled about 25%. Compound, or cumulative, inflation in the town tax rate has been measurably lower than that. Cumulative inflation is the real hardship, so we should measure it. A comparison:

Cumulative inflation in economy writ large, 2018 to 2023: 24.6%

Cumulative increase in town tax rate, FY 2020 to 2025: 19.6%

In other words, including this year’s increase, the town has *lowered* our tax rates, in real (AKA inflation-adjusted) dollars, over a five year period. Of course, none of us like that an increase we *feel* happened in a year where the state also demanded more for education.

I just keep remembering that town staff, the folks we pay, have also faced 25% inflation. For those who plow our roads and otherwise maintain our collective assets, if they didn’t see their pay increased by 25% over these 5 years, they would effectively be getting pay cuts. If one of them saw exactly 25% more pay in the last five years, they would not have seen a real raise. Not for learning more, nor for contributing more to their department than they did five years earlier.

Given that we’ve bumped taxes by less than what would equal a 0% raise (in real dollars) for our folks, I’d say the town is probably “minding the store” just fine. We can always do better, and we will be. But I don’t see a cause for alarm.

Some final thoughts. I have asked the town manager whether there is a program to help folks stay in their homes if tax increases are clearly forcing them out and their hardships are serious and well-documented. That is, a more standardized program than the Board of Abatement. (Many cities maintain such programs, with clear & transparent requirements, to stave off the effects of gentrification.) If not, I think we should consider creating one. And ensuring a good batch of information on which town expenses see inflation and which don’t, come the budget-crafting time in the fall.

Remarks about the upcoming Gaza ceasefire resolution vote

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“The most revolutionary act is a clear view of the world as it really is.” – Rosa Luxemburg

According to a UN report, half the people of Gaza are expected to face death and starvation by July, via the collapse of local agricultural systems and “extreme access constraints” on humanitarian aid.

(FYI, while I’m a selectboard member, I’m not speaking for the board or the town.)

Being anti-war only in hindsight is being pro-war. In 10 years, everyone will have always been against this. That’s what we saw with the Iraq war. But the problem is that everyone wasn’t always against it. A lot of people defended it in the public square. And now they get the benefit of the public having a short memory. This one won’t be like that. The public learned from Iraq. We are committed to remembering where people stood. Whether they were able to say “this is bad, full stop, no qualifiers, and I am willing to risk something to say it.”

What I’m doing now is what, in 20 years, I will have wanted to have done. I’m doing that which I won’t regret.

With all due respect, if you can’t make a simple statement saying that this is bad, “this” being something the UN says there’s a chance is genocide… then that’s decent proof you’re too concerned about what less-informed people think of you. (Or at least more-propagandized people.)

I keep coming back to “are those even votes you want?” Are you happy representing genocide deniers? I am happy to *offer education* in good faith to those with the tendency to deny what this is: collective punishment, and dozens and dozens of well-documented war crimes. But there’s a difference between speaking with those people—giving them your time and effort—and *seeking to represent* this particular view of theirs. In effect, this view is the dehumanization of some very poor, brown, humans. I don’t know about you, but I won’t represent ideas that some other humans don’t have the right to exist. These views simply don’t deserve to be represented.

If “every life is precious,” then why was killing 274 Palestinians this weekend acceptable to rescue four hostages who could have been released in a prisoner transfer, like Hamas has been proposing for months? If killing 60x civilians compared to the number of hostages rescued is acceptable, then what about the 9,112 Palestinians, effectively political prisoners, that Israel currently holds? These four hostages all say their treatment was good, and are in good health. Meanwhile reports about hostages held by Israel describe the worst methods of torture you can imagine. Are you starting to see how grossly the double standard, of humanity/inhumanity, is being applied in the media you’re consuming?

To my fellow board members: would the people saying it’s “not town business” even vote for you? It’s been shown that Biden’s recent lurches rightward, like with immigration policy etc, have not earned him any more would-be votes. I posit that the same thing happens here. If you cater to the most conservative voters, I believe that *generally*, you will not gain their votes. If they really liked you, they may tell you their opinion, but they’d say they trust your decision whatever it is. And that’s important: it’s your decision. You can’t deflect onto not having better polling or something. The town puts us here to make decisions based on what *we* see, and feel, and want. That’s the whole point of us.

Republican Chuck Hagel once got up in front of Congress and said something I agree with wholeheartedly. I’ve been having trouble finding the speech, but I’ll never forget it. In essence he said, I’m astounded how rarely anyone in this body stands for anything. I don’t even care if you stand for the opposite thing I stand for; just stand for something. Believe in something and act on it. Speak with a moral conviction, whatever it is. That’s what people really hear. But more importantly, that’s the only honest thing to say.

Some have said Gaza is “dividing the left.” I believe that, on the contrary, Gaza is *defining* the left. Are you on it? I would love for you to be.

It’s clear that most in Hartford care about antiracism. But is there a “Palestine exception” for that? I’ll share some wisdom from Yousef Munayyer on Twitter: “Violence to free Israelis, the vast majority of whom already enjoy freedom, is totally normalized. Violence to free Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are oppressed, occupied, and subjugated, is totally taboo. This is the height of racist supremacy.”

Lots of people have shared this “flash fiction” between two characters:

“We can disagree and still be friends.”
“Yes, about pizza toppings, not racism.”

From Twitter user @ihategender: “Too many aspiring allies think racial justice is about diversity, ‘inclusion,’ and multiculturalism. No, no, no, Sweetie. This is about overthrowing power that benefits you disproportionately, often exclusively. Are you ready to sacrifice access, entitlement, innocence?” How about votes? Connections? Clients? That said, do you really want connections to those people? Do you need those clients?

Have you noticed that when folks can’t seem to offer evidence to the contrary, or an actual argument with moral weight, then they default to a procedural point? Not that procedure isn’t important; rather, if someone else makes an argument with logical and moral weight, and all you can counter with is procedure or your opinion of procedure… then perhaps you should consider looking for a logical or moral argument with equal strength.

Fellow Hartford residents: The purpose of a system is what it does. When it comes to political systems, we should simply not believe the rhetoric, the stated intentions, the reasoning, the “I didn’t intend for this,” the equivocating. Because we can’t ever be sure about any of that. So we should only ever evaluate a system (like a government) based on what it gets done, and the consequences of what it gets done. What our federal government has been doing is ensuring that one of our client states can continue starving and maiming tens of thousands of civilians. What our local selectboard does, faced with this, is yet to be seen.

I’ll end with verse from T.S. Eliot:

Half of the harm that is done in this world
Is due to people who want to feel important.
They don’t mean to do harm—but the harm
     does not interest them.
Or they do not see it, or they justify it
Because they are absorbed in the endless
     struggle
To think well of themselves.

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